Hello, I am new to Pastafarianism. I am so new that I have not even started yet. However, I am designing and developing a new programming language, and I was wondering if using The Flying Spaghetti monster as a mascott would be out of the question?

What little of Pastafarianism I have come to understand, seems to be in alignment with many of the design philosophies of this programming language. This programming language seeks to be a functional appendage of creative benevolent intent, much like His noodley appendage. It is rooted in humor and rationality. It 'flies' in the face of popular notions of programming language legitimacy, much like the FSM flies in the face of hungry pirates, and staunch antepasto(which sometimes appears to have a face).

The programming language is real, and is already being used to make real programs(although, those programs are admittedly only unit tests). It is actual, and free software, though at this point I am not prepared to link directly to it on such a broad public forum, due to the unstable state of the implementation, and my innate unwillingness to commit on first encounter.

Do Pastafarians want a programming language with a little FSM identity? I know there is a large subgroup of pastafarians that are computer programmers by profession or other qualification. I am willing to trade blessings and endorsement (of a completely conversational nature) for input in the development process, if such a situation were desirable to Pastafarians. I would like to reiterate that this is not a troll; I think the project, Pastafarians, and possibly even the FSM Himself would benefit from such a thing. What do you think?

The question of whether or not computers can think is about as interesting as the question of whether or not submarines can swim- E.W. Dijkstra

Well, programming is a distraction from worshiping his noodleness, drinking beer and chasing whenches. I don't know that it would really fit. A language speaking in pirate tongue would be very cool though...

Walking the plank for entering the wrong information would eliminate users pretty fast in my experience.

I conceded to these points ... however some of them might confuse and/or anger would be users of the language. Less pirate like, but more palatable propaganda may be appropriate for obviously miss guided individuals (programmers). I may just have to ignore all of your suggestions and plunder His image. It's already sort of happened anyhow, and this was just a reconciliation of my flagrant disregard for your at the time, future disagreement with the whole idea.

Debugging is kind of like walking the plank already (stepping, walking... pausing in fear), and some programmers even enjoy it, so maybe the debugger could deter the utterance of invalid statements by being called ThePlank.

The question of whether or not computers can think is about as interesting as the question of whether or not submarines can swim- E.W. Dijkstra

Do this language have a name yet? I assume it's not C-like, something functional?

Disclaimer: Anything I say on topics of Politics, Economics, Pychology, History, really anything not concerned with the natural sciences and mathematics and especially topics concerning human behavior and/or thoughts, that is not associated with a proper reference is pure speculation on my part.

Yar. It's called noodle, for completely unrelated reasons... though after coming to an understanding of His Noodleyness, I imagine this was a part of some grand plan.

Its not c like, it is functional. There is no language native concept of state, but it does have a language native concept of IO and side effects. Functions are high-order, and it has operator declaration at the same level of abstraction as function and module declaration. Its main goal is to be very liberal and non-verbose, without making scope and name resolution overly difficult for the programmer to reason about. The expression syntax is uncluttered and algebraic. It has a computational syntax that has strict ordering semantics, and makes what is lexically visible to an expression and subordinate computations obvious. It also has a declarative syntax that has no strict ordering semantics, in which all lexically grouped symbols are mutually recursive. There is no type system at this point other than structural pattern matching, but one is planned for future iterations.

Right now its entirely interpreted, but it will eventually have its runtime system migrated to c, it will compile to c, and incorporate an interface to c libraries. It is approaching a quasi-stablish milestone, of the unstable but conceptually well established variety, at which point I will be a lot more comfortable linking to it.

To make a sweeping, probably inaccurate categorization, it is something like a mixture of ML, javascript, and haskell, with all of the parts I either don't know how to implement, or don't like- taken out. To get an idea of the syntax and noodleyness, here is a small sample program:

How about instead of asking us gits on the message board if you can use the FSM as a mascot and then admitting that you always intended to ignore us anyway, you ask the guy who actually owns the rights to the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a.k.a. the Prophet Bobby Henderson?